The role of organizational culture for grounding, management, guidance and effectiveness of enterprise architecture principles

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has become a widely acknowledged approach for guiding the continuous change of increasingly complex organizations. While methods and models for describing and analyzing enterprise architectures (EA) have been extensively discussed, principles guiding an EA's design and evolution are hardly covered in existing research. The paper at hand therefore analyzes the mechanisms of EA principles (EAP), that is EAP grounding, EAP management, and EAP guidance and their effects on EA consistency and EAM utility. Specifically we aim at understanding the role of organizational culture for the mechanisms and effects of EAP. Based on empirical data we find that all relations describing EAP mechanisms and their effects are significantly moderated by organizational culture. Based on our findings we give recommendations on how to deal with selected design decisions when introducing and developing EA principles in an organization.